Email marketing can give amazing return on investment (ROI), miles ahead of other direct marketing techniques. They are a fantastic opportunity to build relationships, tell a story and sell your messages. With the rise of automation, personalisation and creative technologies, there has never been a better time to invest time and money in software that truly serves your business. Not convinced you need email marketing software? Read about the benefits here: https://www.postmannewsletter.com/overview/why-use-email-marketing-software/
Whether you want to nurture current contacts or engage new ones, email marketing is a flexible tool that is standing the test of time while increased technological advances push other methods into irrelevance. It’s important to find a provider that serves your needs both on the creative and presentation side, as well as the data and analysis side. In this article, you will find some key points to consider when choosing email marketing software.
Factors to consider
There are three main factors you should consider; integration, presentation options and response handling. Email marketing can take your audience on a strategic journey, channelling them towards a precise action with targeted content. It may take some time to convert to prospects, but with the price of email being so much lower than other direct marketing techniques the conversion is still very much worth the wait and likely to show higher lifetime value. If you are sending emails to multiple contacts, a simple spreadsheet and Outlook send won’t do. This will be slow, inefficient and liable to mistakes.
Integration
Customer Relationship Management Software is the bread and butter of digital marketing. This is the essential place for all your contacts, with the ability to easily import and export data, is essential. Manually doing these things would be hugely time-consuming and leave you vulnerable to human error. Consider how each potential email marketing tool would integrate with your Customer Relationship Management Software. Obviously, the more seamless the better, but consider how it will fit in with your current ways of working and methods of compliance. By integrating your email marketing platform and your Customer Relationship Software, you can achieve higher quality analysis with a fraction of the effort, by giving easy access to data and key metrics such as open rates unsubscribes and click-through rates.
Think mobile
Mobile is now the most common way people read their emails. Smartphones are everywhere and need to be prioritised when it comes to design and content. Templates, pictures and download speeds must be tailored to mobile viewing. Some providers allow you to change what content is seen based on whether the viewer is looking at the email via mobile or not. This can be a useful tool for tweaking the image to text ratio or email length to ensure it looks right on mobile and desktop. If it doesn’t display correctly, you risk increased unsubscribes or even being blacklisted, which could seriously damage all your hard work creating a trustworthy relationship with your audience. Don’t go straight to junk, check the mobile display.
Response handling
If you’re sending communications out, expect to be communicated with. Whether that is to a handful or hundreds of thousands of addresses, a plan for dealing with responses is a must. Some providers have handy tools to help with this, such as automatic replies and specific forwarding addresses when someone replies directly to your email. Many tools can help you deal with a large number of responses in a more proficient way.
